Why Facebook Hasn’t Hit a Billion Users

5102012

Yesterday Facebook announced that it had passed the billion mark. It made news around the globe. This was part of a media onslaught that also included the unveiling of Facebook’s first agency made commercial.

I have serious reasons to doubt accuracy of the figure. Earlier this year the company I work for was asked by the Student Loans Company to ascertain what proportion of their target audience were Facebook users We guessed it would be most but we wanted to provide a robust response.

We took population data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and matched it against age banded user data published by Facebook. This was not entirely straightforward because the age bands that Facebook uses are not the same bands as the ONS uses. Undeterred we found the following.

UK Population by age:

20-24 – 4.31 million

15-19 – 3.91 million

To get an 18-24 approximate figure we took the 20-24 figure and added 2/5 of the 15-19 figure. This gives us 5.87 million for the size of the population. Facebook data for this age group said that there were 7.33 million users. So to answer the question that would mean 125% of the UK population aged 18-24 have a Facebook account. The only reasonable explanation is that a good proportion of people have more than one Facebook account. Anecdotally we know this to be true. There are also a lot of fake accounts – 83 million according to Facebook’s own figures.

The billion user story is great for PR, at a time when Facebook really needs it. There may be a billion Facebook accounts but I’m confident that they haven’t hit a billion users, yet.